A Base Vocabulary List

Your Base Vocabulary: The first ~625 words

Your Base Vocabulary: Your first 625 words

This is a new, improved version of an older list of 400 words. In my own studies, I’ve found that having an extra couple hundred words in the beginning makes everything a lot easier; you feel more comfortable with spelling and pronunciation, you recognize many more words in your textbook, and you can start delving into grammar while feeling like a bad-ass. Nice.

I’ve culled this list from the General Service List and Wordfrequency.info – two well-made frequency lists for English. These are common words that are relatively easy to picture, so you can learn them without translations right from the start. Most of them will show up in the top 2000 words of your target language, and so you can save a bit of time by adding these words to your Anki deck right at the beginning.

I’ve also begun a project to get this list professionally translated into a bunch of languages. I’m compiling those translations into handy little frequency dictionaries (with pronunciation information, gender, etc.), so they’re easy and quick to use. You’ll find more details at the bottom of this page.

How to use this list:

Pronunciation (in general): Learn your pronunciation rules. You should know what pronunciation to expect based upon the spelling of a word. Seriously. There’s no reason to memorize a bunch of words incorrectly; no one will understand what you’re saying. You can find pronunciation resources for a bunch of languages in the Languages section, and there are easy ways to learn pronunciation using Anki.

Translations into your target language: Look up translations for each of the words in this list (or if you’re learning a common language, grab my translations). I’m a huge fan of Lonely Planet phrasebooks for this purpose; they’re cheap, short, and easy to look through, and you’ll find good translations for most of these words in there. I’m providing this list in two formats: thematic (animals, jobs, locations) and alphabetic. Use the alphabetic list to get good translations for all of your words in a matter of minutes.

Images: Once you have your translations, go to Google images and look up the word you found in your target language. You’re looking to see whether speakers of your target language associate the word you found with the sort of images you’d expect. There are three things that can happen here:I. The pictures are just what you’d expect to see. Good. Add them to Anki.II. The pictures don’t seem to make any sense whatsoever. Skip that word for now, or try a different translation. This list is just a time-saving tool stolen from an English frequency list, and it won’t work all the time. Many languages don’t use the same Breakfast/Dinner/Lunch concept as English speakers. Russian has separate words for light blue and dark blue. So if the images you get don’t make sense, skip them! You’ll get the right words later, from your own language’s frequency list.III. The pictures make sense, but they’re not quite what you expected. For example, you searched for девушка (girl) in Russian, and found that oddly enough, nearly every single девушка seems to be an 18-year old, nearly-naked girl. Memory-wise, this is the best case scenario. You’re learning that девушка isn’t just another word for girl. It’s a totally newword, and therefore a lot more interesting (and more interesting = more memorable, every time). Find 1-3 pictures that can help you remember what you’re seeing, and move on to the next word.You’ll find that this turns into a fun game. What pictures are you going to see when you look up the next word? Can you find a subtle difference between what you’re seeing and what you’d expect to see in English? When you look up pictures in English, you aren’t learning anything new; it’s basically just busy work. When you look up a picture in your target language, it’s much more interesting, and as a result, it’s much more memorable.In the event that you’re using a language with an almost nonexistent internet presence (Cherokee, or something), then you’re going to need to be extremely careful here, and ideally run your pictures in front of a native speaker and make sure that each word means what you think it means. Intensively learning the wrong words for things is something you should try to avoid at all costs. For languages like these (and dead languages, like Latin or Ancient Greek), you may need to resort to looking up pictures in English, based upon translations. This is too bad (it means you’re never going to encounter option III, above), but it’s the best you can do.

Recordings: If you’re just starting out, go to Forvo.com and get recordings for new words. Add those recordings to your Anki deck until you start feeling pretty confident about pronunciation.

Make your flashcards: Add the words to Anki (with their images and recordings, and without their translations). If necessary, add gender information and maybe an example sentence from Google images (but if you’re just starting out, you might want to wait a bit before using example sentences!)

The List(s)

A quick note about order

I’m providing this list in two formats: a thematic list and an alphabetical list.

The thematic list is friendly: you’ll see lists of animals, types of clothing, professions, etc. It’s the sort of thing you’ve probably seen before in a grammar book, and I’ve added notes in a few sections to give you suggestions about how to learn a given topic without using translations (For example, you can learn units of time [days, hours, minutes] using pictures of clocks and basic, fill-in-the-blank formulas: 24 x ora = 1 __ [giorno], 60 x ___ [minuto] = 1 x ora).

Thematic lists are nice ways to organize words, but I’m going to suggest that you avoid them when you actually sit down to learn your words, and use an alphabetical list instead. Why?

Order is important. In language classes, you’ll typically learn words in thematic order because it’s a comfortable way to organize classes (“Today, we’re going to learn about animals!”) and it’s a comfortable way to learn (“Today, I learned about animals!”). But there’s an unintended consequence of doing this: you get your words mixed up. I learned all of my French numbers and colors at the same time, and I still have problems remembering whether sept is six or seven, or whether jaune is yellow or green. This is borne out by the research: when you learn a bunch of similar words at once, you’ll have a harder time remembering which one is which. The opposite is also true: when you learn a bunch of totally unrelated words at once (dog, apple, red, skyscraper, president), you’ll have an easier time remembering those words.

So I’m going to give you this list in alphabetical order. Once you translate the words into your target language, they’re basically going to be in random order, and as a result, they’ll be much easier to remember. It’s also a lot easier to translate an alphabetical list. If you’re using a phrase book for your translations, you can go through, mark off your A-words, your B-words, and so on, and you’ll be done translating within 30 minutes.

Easily Confounded Images (i.e., ‘girl’ looks like ‘daughter’) are designated with an asterisk (Like this*). These are groups of words that will use very similar images (girl/daughter, marriage/wedding). Learn these words by adding a personal touch (i.e., the name of a ‘daughter’ you might know) or an additional word or two in your target language (i.e., daughter might go with mother/father).

Note: You may not find all of these in your glossary, and you may have trouble finding pictures even if you do. That’s fine. Skip them for now, or use my collection of images for directions and prepositions at Fluent-Forever.com/Appendix5

Note: If you search for a number (uno (one), dos (two), tres (three)), you’ll find pictures of objects (1 apple, 2 monkeys, etc.). This usually works until 10. Then search for the digits (10, 11, 12). You’ll find colorful numerals, address signs, etc. Use these images (picture of hotel room #33) instead of text (#33); these pictures easier to remember and they don’t get mixed up as easily.

Note: You’ll usually find pictures of people going to work on Mondays and partying on Fridays/Saturdays, etc. To get more specific, use an image of a weekly calendar with weekends greyed out and indicate which day you want. I’ll find a few good calendars to use and post them here in the near future.

Note: For verbs, you’ll probably need to learn your language’s word for “verb” and add it to any verb that could masquerade as a noun (to kiss vs a kiss). Basically, get a picture of two people kissing, add the word “Verb” underneath, and poof, you’ve got a pretty clear “to kiss.”

Note: Make sure you read about these in your grammar book before adding them. Languages divide their pronouns into many categories. Hungarian, for instance, has six words for “you” (singular informal, singular formal (for acquaintances), singular official (for teachers, policemen, bureaucrats), plural informal, etc.), and depending upon how you count, Japanese either has no pronouns or tons ofpronouns. We’ll need to have some pronouns now in order to deal with grammar later, so you’ll want to find at least a few words to refer to yourself or someone else. You’ll find a good explanation of pronouns (and a list of them) in the beginning of your grammar book. Note that you don’tyet need him, her, his, their, etc. We’ll get them later, when we discuss grammar.

How do you learn these without translations? Use pictures of people pointing at themselves/each other. There are decent pronoun pictures on Google Images, and I’ve gotten some better ones commissioned here. Use these images, and if your language, like Hungarian, has different sorts of pronouns for different sorts of relationships (i.e., friends vs acquaintances), then take a few minutes to think of some people you’d use these pronouns with. Use their names on your flashcards.

Enjoy! Please make sure you follow the instructions above. This is a tool that can be misused and seriously mess up your language studies from the beginning if you badly translate words into your target language and then intensively drill them into your memory with Anki. Also if you skip the pronunciation step then you’re going to have a harder time memorizing them, recognizing them when a native speaker says them, and you’ll be intensively drilling bad habits into your brain. The steps are there to save you time; they’re worth following.

Translations

When you’re using an alphabetical list, the translation step (Step 2, above) is pretty easy. But still, it takes some time and you may not particularly want to do it. If you’re learning one of the languages of my Kickstarter:

Spanish

Italian

French

Portuguese

German

Russian

Hebrew

Arabic

Mandarin Chinese

Cantonese

Japanese

Korean

Dutch

Hungarian

I’ve commissioned and compiled a professional translations of this list, put them into a set of thematic groups that makes them ~10% easier to memorize and commissioned 90 original illustrations for each thematic group. I’ve added detailed pronunciation information, gender (when appropriate), counting words (when appropriate) and occasional notes when a word doesn’t quite translate directly. So if you want to save yourself ~30-60 minutes of time, then grab one of these translations. [As mentioned above, you’ll find information about these on the Word Lists page, and you can order them here]

If your language isn’t listed here, send me an email. If I see enough interest in a given language, I’ll find a translator and get it done.

This is psychologically untrue, memory is created through association. The cells in the brain have pathways connecting them which is where memories are stored. memories are created through assovciation, because they are made of paths which connect to each other. This is why when you go to a place you havent been for a long time you start to remember lots of things. Seeing a bench where you had your first kiss will trigger the cell which connects to all the other memories. This is true with forgetting… it happens when there are no longer paths to trigger the memory.

Paloma, I’d say the end kinda justifies the means here. Best to forget about studies and just test things out yourself, that’s why many of us are here anyways. I’m a die-hard linguist, but I’ve found that pontificating over linguistic theory and actually having fun acquiring a language are worlds apart.

Thank you for this helpful list! I’m trying to use it to build vocabulary in my husband’s native language. However, why do I only see 604 words? Also, it is difficult to create a spreadsheet from only a PDF file (no easy way to copy and paste).

So how to use these list is to put them in your Anki cards with the pronunciation and picture? So front of card will have the foreign word with picture and back will have the English translation with pronunciation?

First of all, my apologies if my question has already been posted and answered elsewhere here and I’ve just missed it. I’ve been working on learning Hebrew over the last few weeks and after listening to the audio version of the book, decided to take a look at the word list for use in Anki. Being a blind user of the software, I’ve had to approach things slightly differently, so rather than using images as part of my flashcards, I’ve had to use audio cues as a reminder of their meaning as an example. While the 600 or so words here look like a wonderful resource and I know that it would be up to me to replace image cues with audio ones that would work in my situation, I’d still like to know how many of the words in the Hebrew translations package come with audio for their pronunciations. The current list that I’ve been able to locate on Ankiweb is a list of 500 basic words, the Hebrew word and an audio recording of it being pronounced for the front and the same pronunciation and English text for its phonetic pronunciation and translation on the back. So far this has been working pretty well, but it was this larger list that had me interested in the list here that was mentioned in the book. Before I made the purchase, I figured it might be worth asking about here first. 🙂
Thanks bunches for all the wonderful information and for any other ideas/advice.
Jeremy

I’ve been using the canto list to try and learn some words, but according to my canto girlfriend the vocab is very academic rather than colloquial. Basically I’m going to end up sounding like a newspaper. Any chance a free update could be provided that fixes this issue? This can cause comprehension problems, for example the word for shirt (chan3 saam1) refers to a traditional shirt nowadays.

Thank you so much! This seems so great and I’m looking forward to trying it out. My boyfriend’s parents barely speak English so I’m going to learn Mandarin so I can talk to them via Skype (they live in Taiwan, we live in the U.S.).

Quick question, and maybe I missed it as I was reading: should I learn the phonetics first and then how to spell the words? Or vice versa? Or at the same time?

Very frustrated. I am trying to make cards and go to Forvo to get sound recordings, but the page is nothing like the one shown in the videos. I typed in the word animal to find the Spanish word and sound and it doesn’t exist. Other words were the same. I tried typing words in Spanish and I can find a recording but it won’t let me copy it even though I have an account.